Excerpts from The Horseshoe Curve

“Captures the reader’s attention
in the best tradition of spy novels....A
must-read for history enthusiasts....”
—David W. Seidel, Horseshoe
Curve Chapter, National Railway Historical Society

$29.95

Chapter One
NAZIS IN THE NIGHT

At midnight on Saturday, June 13, 1942, six months after the United States
entered World War II, a German submarine, concealed by fog, prowled the eastern
coast of Long Island, one hundred fivemiles from New York
City.

Aboard Unterboot 202 were Captain LieutenantHans-Heinz
Linder, commander, and forty-five submariners.Four other
men also were aboard, but they were not crew members. They were one of two
teams of Nazi saboteurs sent to destroy strategic targets in the United States,
including the Horseshoe Curve on the Pennsylvania Railroad near Altoona,
Pennsylvania, the center of the nation’s industrial heartland.

Four hours earlier, having crossed three thousand miles of the Atlantic
in seventeen days, U-202 had approached the American coast from Nova Scotiaandentered
the waters off the remote seaside village of Amagansett, New York, seventeen
miles from Montauk Point and the eastern tip of Long Island. Ten miles from
the American shore, powered by its diesel engines, the submarine descended
to the ocean floor, waiting for the cover of darkness to discharge the saboteurs.
At midnight, the sub engaged its quiet electric motors and surfaced, feeling
its way toward the shore through the darkness and fog.

U-202 was a Class VIIC submarine launched from the Krupp Works in Kiel,
Germany in March 1941, one of a series of vessels called “Atlantic
Boats,” the workhorses of the Nazi fleet, and one of fourteen hundred
subs in the Kriegsmarine during World War II. A Class VIIC sub could dive
to seven hundred twenty-two feet and had a top speed of 17.7 knots (20.4
miles per hour) when traveling on the surface and 7.6 knots (8.7 miles per
hour) when submerged. Nazi U-Boats ran on the surface as much as possible
where their diesel engines could propel the vessels more rapidly.

Had U-202 tried to cross the Atlantic submerged, the trip would have taken
fourteen days, assuming that the sub maintained a straight course and a constant
speed. Surface travel was quicker but also more jarring because subs were
pounded on the surface by the wind and the waves. With five torpedo tubes,
four at the bow and one at the stern, U-202 carried fourteen torpedoes. Probably
the most famous Class VIIC submarine was U-96 portrayed in the movie, Das
Boot (The Boat), although a more recent film, U-571, also features
a Class VIIC submarine.

Nazi U-Boat commanders were extensively trained and underwent a twelve-week
introductory course followed by an eight-week torpedo course, a four-week
radio course, and a four-week anti-aircraft course. Commander candidates
then spent eighteen months as U-Boat watch officers and completed an eight-week
command course and one patrol as commander trainees. Of the fourteen hundred
Nazi U-Boat commanders in World War II, five hundred seventy-four died in
battle.

Captain Lieutenant Linder, one of five hundred twenty-three Nazi submarine
commanders who held this mid-level officer rank, had logged a short but respectable
record aboard U-202; on his last mission, he had sunk three Allied ships
off the coast of Greenland. Born on February 11, 1913 in Kaiserslautern,
Germany, Linder commanded two U-Boats during his naval career: U-18 from
September 3, 1940 to December 17, 1940 and U-202 from December 18, 1940 until
the sub’s demise at 3:00 AM on June 2, 1943, sunk off Cape Farewell,
Greenland by gunfire and depth charges from the British Sloop HMS Starling. In
that attack, eighteen sailors on U-202 were killed, but thirty crew members
survived, including Linder, who died in Germany on September 10, 1944. Stout
with blue eyes and a ruddy complexion, the six-foot-tall Linder had a trim
mustache and beard and, like most U-Boat commanders, was almost never without
his white captain’s cap (which Americans irreverently call “bus
driver hats”). His crew painted a multi-colored porcupine as their
mascot on the sub’s conning tower, and the officers and sailors of
U-202 wore a small metal pin on their hats of a porcupine that the sub’s
machinist had made.

U-202 left the Kriegsmarine submarine base at Lorient on the northwest coast
of France in the Province of Brittany on the night of Thursday, May 28, 1942.
As she crossed the North Atlantic, the sub ran underwater during the day
to avoid being spotted by Allied warships or aircraft. The British, who tracked
the departure of U-202 by decrypting messages from the German U-Boat Command,
alerted the Royal Air Force, but the submarine escaped attack, and the purpose
of its mission was unknown to the Allies. Linder took the uncommon step of
ordering a practice drill every day, during which the submarine crash-dived
and all hands manned their battle stations. When U-202 reached the middle
of the Atlantic and the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, Linder took a chance
and surfaced during the day so his crew could get some sun and test-fire
the sub’s deck guns.

Throughout the trip, the four saboteurs aboard the sub, unaccustomed to
ocean travel, were extremely seasick, and one sailor, Zimmermann, a mechanic,
suffered from appendicitis. Except for the radio and torpedo rooms, which
were off-limits to them, the saboteurs could move about U-202 as they liked,
although U-Boats were famously crowded. U-202 was two hundred eleven feet
long outside and one hundred forty-two feet long inside.

Linder had planned to land on Long Island on the night of Thursday, June
11, 1942, but was delayed by fog between Nova Scotia and Long Island. During
the planning of the raid, George John Dasch, the leader of the four saboteurs
aboard U-202, had suggested landing between East Hampton, four miles west
of Amagansett, and Southampton, fifteen miles westof Amagansett,
but in the fog, Captain Lieutenant Linder had misjudged the landing site.

Nazi planners of the mission also had considered landing on the central
coast of New Jersey near the town of Ocean Beach, but Dasch, although he
had lived in the United States for nineteen years before returning to Germany
and joining the sabotage operation, did not know the Jersey shore. Dasch
favored the south shore of Long Island as the landing site because he knew
that area well, having gone swimming there when he lived in the United States.
Actually, Dasch knew the north shore of Long Island better than the South
Shore because he had worked as a waiter in the north shore towns of Centerport
and Stonybrook. But aboard U-202, Dasch later claimed, Captain
Lieutenant Linder
had shown him only maps of the south shore because Linder said he did not
have charts of the north shore.

At 1:30 AM on Saturday, June 13, Linder piloted
U-202 to within five hundred yards of the Long Island coast, so close that
the sub scraped the ocean floor before surfacing parallel to the shore, its
heavier starboard side facing inland. Linder summoned Dasch to the submarine’s
conning tower to scan the landing site, and when Dasch saw the dense fog
shrouding the beach, he said to himself, “Why, Christ, this is perfect.
You could not see fifty feet ahead.”

Quickly, Dasch
descended the tower and told his three fellow saboteurs to prepare to land.
Dasch wore civilian clothes, while the other saboteurs wore German Navy Arbeitspächen
(work clothes), but stuffed civilian clothes, which they would don after
they had landed, into a duffel bag. (In World War II, enemy agents who were
captured wearing civilian clothes were considered spies and often shot, unlike
uniformed military personnel who were protected as prisoners-of-war under
the Geneva Convention. Therefore, Nazi architects of the raid directed that
the saboteurs land in military clothing.) Two of the enemy agents wore no
caps, while the other two wore civilian hats, including Dasch, who sported
a floppy fedora. While the saboteurs prepared to land, crewmen of U-202 carried
two small shovels and four wooden boxes with rope handles, each about the
size of an orange crate that contained the saboteurs’ equipment,
to the submarine’s deck. Below, the saboteurs joined Captain Lieutenant
Linder for a farewell toast.

Two young submariners chosen for their strength would accompany
the saboteurs to the shore and had lashed a black rubber raft amidships
of U-202. The sailors slid the shovels and wooden boxes into the raft and
boarded it. Next, three saboteurs entered. Last came Dasch who sat aft,
carrying a gym bag he had owned in the United States with $175,000 ($2
million today) sewn into its lining. A thin rope tied to the side of the
raft would be used to pull the raft and the two sailors back to the sub
after they had dropped the saboteurs on the beach. Each man in the raft
had a small paddle except Dasch, who had a long oar, and as the sailors
and saboteurs rowed toward shore, the rope was payed out by a sailor on
the submarine’s deck. One sailor in the
raft carried a small flashlight with a blue light to signal U-202 when the
sailors were ready to return to the sub. Both sailors carried submachine
guns. If the saboteurs encountered people on shore, they were to kill or
disable them and put their bodies in the raft.
“You bring the bodies back,” Captain Lieutenant Linder had ordered
the two sailors in the raft, “and we’ll feed them to the fish when
we get back out to sea.”

As the sailors and enemy agents bobbed away from U-202, the fog
swallowed the raft, and after ten minutes of rowing, Dasch heard the sound
of the surf. However, he also detected something else—something very wrong—the
sound of the waves was coming from all directions. The raft was going in
circles. Dasch ordered the saboteurs and sailors to stop rowing
so he could listen to the surf. When he determined the direction of the shore,
he told the men to row hard, yelling over the crashing waves, “Come
on, boys, let’s go to it!”

The raft neared land, and three strong waves filled it with water, nearly
capsizing it and drowning the men. Two saboteurs lost their paddles, but
Dasch groped the ocean floor with his long oar and managed to right the raft.
When he saw the shore, he jumped into the water up to his waist and pulled
the raft onto land. The three other saboteurs scrambled out of the raft after
him, dragging the wooden boxes behind them.

Dasch quickly climbed the hill above the beach to survey the area
and was shocked at what he saw—inland to his left and right stoodbeacons.
The saboteurs had landed at a United States Coast Guard Station. Terrified,
Dasch ran down the hill and told the other saboteurs to change into civilian
clothes and bury their soaked Marine fatigues. Dasch then raced to the raft
where the two sailors were struggling to turn it over and empty the water
inside it. Just then through the fog on the beach, Dasch saw a faint light
moving toward him.

At 6:30 PM on Wednesday, July 1, 1942, twenty-five agents of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, eighteen officers of the Altoona Police
Department, and ten detectives from the Pennsylvania State Police swept
through Altoona, Pennsylvania, the “Railroad Capital of the World,” and
searched the homes of two hundred twenty-five city residents. Armed with
a warrant from the president of the United States, John F. Sears, special
agent in charge of the Philadelphia Office of the FBI, led the searches
and reported that although he had made similar incursions in Harrisburg,
Philadelphia, and Scranton as well as other Pennsylvania cities, the Altoona
raid was the largest in the Keystone State.

Working in pairs, law enforcement officers moved throughout the
city in police and unmarked automobiles and searched the targeted residences
for cameras, firearms, ammunition, signal devices, and short-wave radio
receiving or transmitting sets, which the United States government had
barred the suspects, called “alien enemies,” from owning. An
alien enemy was a descriptor the Justice Department used for a person who
lived in the United States, but was a citizen of a country at war with
America. During World War II, German, Italian, and Japanese alien enemies
in the United States were subject to strict regulations on their residence,
employment, travel, possessions, finances, memberships, and speech.

Most people know of the internment of one hundred twenty thousand Japanese
Americans in the United States during World War II, but few are aware that
this nation also interned eleven thousand German Americans and four thousand
Italian Americans during the war, and thousands more had their homes ransacked
and their property confiscated.

Before leaving Altoona at noon on Thursday, July 2, 1942, Sears
disclosed that male and female Altoonans of German and Italian nationality
had been arrested, but he refused to identify them. FBI agents escorted
the Altoonans apprehended to the post office at Eleventh Avenue and Twelfth
Street in the city where Joseph P. Brennan, assistant United States attorney
for the Middle Judicial District of Pennsylvania, interrogated them. Those
held in what Sears called “technical custody” were scheduled to appear before
an Alien Enemy Review Board, one of approximately one hundred such tribunals
the Justice Department had established across the country to consider charges
against alien enemies and recommend their release, parole, or internment.
If the Alien Enemy Review Board determined that the persons taken into custody
were threats to national security, the board could advise the Justice Department
that they be interned for the duration of the war. (The phrase, “taken
into custody,” according to the United States Department of Justice,
had several meanings, ranging from arrest and immediate release to internment.
Many alien enemies across the United States were technically arrested and
ordered to report to a law enforcement agency or an Alien Enemy Review Board
for questioning. Although some alien enemies were not placed in actual custody,
others who were arrested were put in jail.)

Special Agent Sears said that the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
in conjunction with Pennsylvania and Altoona police authorities, had secretly
investigated the two hundred twenty-five Altoonans whose homes had been
searched for weeks and described the cooperation of state and city authorities
as “100
percent perfect.” Joining Sears in leading the arrests were Lieutenant
L.W.F. Haberstroh of the Altoona Police Department and Lieutenant H.A. Edie
of the Pennsylvania State Police. Mayor Charles Rhodes of Altoona conferred
with Sears and other law enforcement officers during the arrests.

Weeks before the raid, the city of Altoona and the Pennsylvania
Railroad, the area’s largest employer, had taken measures to protect the Horseshoe
Curve, five miles west of Altoona, which J. Edgar Hoover, director of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, had identified as one of the targets of
the Nazi saboteurs sent to destroy industrial and transportation facilities
in the United States. Hoover announced the arrest of the saboteurs in a nationwide
news conference on June 27, 1942. Members of the Blair County Defense Police,
many of whom worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad, had been guarding the
Altoona shops of the rail company, the largest such facility in the United
States, since the outbreak of World War II. Councilman John C. Calhoun, director
of the department of parks, water, and public property for the city of Altoona,
had ten men (three regular, seven extra) patrolling the city’s reservoirs
near the Horseshoe Curve, and Altoona city council had posted fifteen hundred “No
Parking” signs near the Curve and passed a “No Trespassing” ordinance
in that area.

When asked if the Altoona raid was linked to the arrest of the Nazi
saboteurs, Special Agent Sears replied, “Yes or no. You must draw your own conclusions.” However,
in the wake of the national hysteria created by the seizure of the saboteurs,
many Americans suspected that the saboteurs had support networks of Nazi
sympathizers in cities near their targets. Chief among such cities was Altoona,
Pennsylvania.

On July 3, 1942, the day after Sears left Altoona, the United Press International
reported that twenty alien enemies taken into custody on July 1 and 2 in
Altoona and Chester, Pennsylvania as well as in Wilmington, Delaware had
been sent to the federal internment camp at Gloucester City, New Jersey.
According to the United Press International, these twenty alien enemies were
considered the most dangerous of the two hundred fifty people whose homes
the Federal Bureau of Investigation had searched on July 1 and 2, two hundred
twenty-five of whom were from Altoona.

Chapter Thirty-Four
“THIS BROKEN AND DIVERSIFIED COUNTRY”

They rise in New England and extend to Alabama, one thousand five
hundred miles long, four hundred miles wide, and two thousand feet high.
Their steep, parallel, and densely wooded ridges are some of the most inhospitable
country in the United States, and crossing them was one of this nation’s
greatest achievements.

They are part of the Ridge and Valley Physiographic Province, a
geologic formation in the eastern United States that resembles a wrinkled
rug that has been pushed across a floor against a heavy piece of furniture.
George Ashley, director of the Pennsylvania Geological Survey from 1919
to 1946, first used the “wrinkled rug” analogy, but could not determine
what had produced this striking geologic phenomenon. Today, geologists believe
that the Ridge and Valley Physiographic Province was created when the west
coast of Africa collided with the continent of North America—in geologic
slow motion—some three hundred million years ago. Such an impact is
said to have been caused by “plate tectonics,” the theory that
the earth’s continents, or “plates,” once moved. Satellite
photographs today show that the shape of the Ridge and Valley PhysiographicProvince
and the outline of the west coast of Africa are identical.

Millennia ago, rivers and streams cut through Pennsylvania, carving
in “this
broken and diversified country,” as George G. Groff, professor of natural
history at Bucknell University, once described it, the Juniata River, a one
hundred-mile waterway so winding that it does not seem to know where it wants
to go. For example, at its midpoint near Lewistown, the Juniata flows north,
south, east, and west—all within three miles. In the mid-1700s, the
Juniata was the gateway west for thousands of settlers entering the Pennsylvania
frontier from Philadelphia. A century later, the Juniata Valley became the
route through the heart of Pennsylvania for the Pennsylvania Railroad, the
self-proclaimed “Standard Railroad of the World.”

The Ridge and Valley Physiographic Province has split Pennsylvania
in two and rendered the Commonwealth a land of contradictions: mountainous
yet flat, urban yet rural, industrial yet agricultural. The people of Pennsylvania
share the divided nature of their land, identifying themselves mainly as
eastern Pennsylvanians or western Pennsylvanians, Philadelphians or Pittsburghers,
fans of the Phillies and Eagles or the Pirates and Steelers, citizens of
the same Commonwealth, but with little in common. The mountains that divide
Pennsylvania once formed an insurmountable barrier that separated east from
west not only in the Keystone State but in the entire United States and threatened
the western expansion of the nation. Part of America’s famed Appalachian
Range, these mountains in Pennsylvania are the historic Alleghenies.